World News Quick Take

Agencies

SOUTH KOREA

North’s defense boss sacked

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has replaced his defense chief with a hawkish general in a shakeup apparently aimed at tightening his grip over the military, Yonhap News Agency said yesterday. Vice Marshal Kim Jong-gak was sacked as defense minister after just seven months in office, Yonhap quoted an unnamed presidential official in Seoul as saying. He was replaced by Kim Kyok-sik, who is believed to have orchestrated the North’s sinking of one of the South’s warships and an artillery attack on a border island in 2010, it said.

PHILIPPINES

Chinese ships a concern

The government is still asking China to withdraw three ships from a disputed shoal in the South China Sea almost six months after it promised to pull out, Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario said yesterday. Del Rosario said that while Manila withdrew its own ships from the Scarborough Shoal — known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) in Taiwan, which also claims it — on June 4, as agreed by both countries, China’s three government ships remained in the area. “They have three ships in the vicinity right now. They have never really left. We are continuing to ask them to honor our sovereignty and ... we are asking them to pull out their ships as agreed upon,” he said. He said that in June a Chinese embassy official initially said the weather was too rough for their ships to move but did not say when they would leave.

THAILAND

‘Red Shirt’ trial postponed

A court yesterday postponed till next month the start of the terrorism trial of 24 leaders of the Red Shirt protests that rocked Bangkok in 2010, because one of the defendants was ill. The accused, who include five lawmakers, could in theory face the death penalty for their roles in the rallies. The judge postponed the first hearing until Dec. 13 because a lawyer for Red Shirt militant leader Arisman Pongreungrong said his client could not attend the trial due to food poisoning. The defendants have pleaded not guilty to terrorism charges.

PAKISTAN

Doctor on hunger strike

The doctor who helped the CIA hunt down former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden started a hunger strike in his jail cell this week to protest against his living conditions, prison officials said yesterday. Shakil Afridi was sentenced in May to 33 years in jail for his links to a banned militant group. Prison officials in Peshawar said they are keeping Afridi in solitary confinement and will not allow him to have visitors nor speak to anyone by telephone as punishment for a media interview he gave in September. “After the interview in which Dr Shakil Afridi leveled serious allegations against the country’s top spy agency, the prison authorities barred his family members and lawyers from meeting him,” an official said.

NETHERLANDS

Kosovo’s ex-PM aquitted

The UN Yugoslav war crimes court yesterday acquitted Kosovo’s former prime minister Ramush Haradinaj and two aides in a retrial on charges of murder and torture during the 1990s war of independence from Belgrade. “The chamber finds you not guilty on all counts in the indictment,” Judge Bakone Justice Moloto told the court in The Hague, ordering the men released. Judges found that the accused had not taken part in a “joint criminal enterprise” to cleanse the area of ethnic Serbs, and that some witness testimony was unreliable.